By Polly Raymond, 22 February 1999 17:57
NEWS The UK's Employment Service will enter the information age this year with the creation of national virtual job centre schemes across the country. The move is part of a package of measures designed to increase the reach of employment services through new media. The pilot programme beginning in April will see job vacancies being posted on the service's Web site and being processed through a pilot call centre project based in North East England. One per cent of all UK vacancies will go online. They will consist of hard-to-fill positions such as mobile workers, jobs advertised to overseas applicants and armed forces vacancies. According to an Employment Service spokeswoman, these may stand a better chance of getting filled over the Web. Responding to criticism that many citizens do not have Web access, a spokeswoman said the jobs advertised online will only be replications of jobs that go up in all the usual places. She explained: "We are pursuing a continuous programme of change to ensure our services can be accessed by as wide an audience as possible." When the trials are completed towards the end of the year, an evaluation will be undertaken to see how and when the Web site strategies can be made mainstream. Details of the measures can be found in the full document, entitled 'The Way Ahead', which is published this week. It contains retrospective analysis about plans the Service made last year to "make greater use of IT", admitting that this had been an understatement.
In order to post a comment you need to be registered and logged in.
Log in or create your silicon.com account below